


my mentors hand, rests on my throat

by plutoeux



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Dialogue study, M/M, Pining, Pining Keith (Voltron), Post Season 2, aka shirogane is shirogone, i cant believe thats a fuckin tag, lance says one (1) nice thing to keith. keith falls in love, mutual pining??????? who knows. not me, shiro is quite literally "like a brother" to keith. big brogane vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 05:23:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11662473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutoeux/pseuds/plutoeux
Summary: Once, at his second home, Keith's foster mother had told him that he held his hands the way he did, simply because he was always ready to catch the world swinging, left fist first. She had called him an angry boy, the kind that simply entered the world with too much anger. That he was a boy who was always ready to face things head first, anger first, fists first.When he met Shiro, he had told him the same thing.  That he was a boy who came at everything swinging.He couldn’t really say that had ever changed.





	my mentors hand, rests on my throat

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this a while back! i think pining, PTSD keith is an interesting subject, and the whole Everyone Is Inferior To Shiro And Thinks He Is Perfect is a fun trope to write the kids with. i think that sometimes i forget, how young the paladins and allura are, and sometimes i re-watch an episode and i'm just... held back with a Wow They're So Fucking Young and Emotionally Raw! this is also playing with a little bit of my childhood inferiority complexes, and how i competed with my siblings. hope it's not too bad! 
> 
> (pidge uses they/them)

            It was late when Keith came into the navigation room.

 

            The room’s lights were dimmed, the only indication of the late hour. Behind the flickering holoscreens sat an expanse of space, a solar system that Keith would never find in textbooks or Garrison lectures, a smear of stars and planets and suns that were deep, deep into space. The lack of light cast plum shadows against the control panels, humming in the embrace artificial blue light.  The castle had settled into a melancholic night mode, the others tucked into their rooms, chasing the little sleep they could find, if any.

 

            He hesitated, hands instinctively curling into fists as he perched in the wide entryway to the grand room. His heart sat in his teeth, head swimming with a thousand feelings, all trying to leave his mind single file. He felt his fingernails pressing into his palm.

 

            Once, at his second home, his foster mother had told him that he held his hands the way he did, simply because he was always ready to catch the world swinging, left fist first. She had called him an _angry boy_ , the kind that he entered the world with too much anger. That he was a boy who was always ready to face things head first, anger first, fists first.

 

            When he met Shiro, he had told him the same thing.  That he was a boy who came at everything swinging.

 

            He couldn’t really say that had ever changed.

 

            He uncurled his fingers, thumbs running over the half-moons that his nails kissed into his skin, and absentmindedly ran a hand over the spot where his knife sat, comfortingly. The weight of it was cool against his mental calamity.

 

            In the doorway he stood, eyes trained on Lance’s back as he hummed his way through the controls he tinkered with. His scratchy, off-key humming was comforting, toes tapping in time with the song he spun. It was a tune foreign to Keith, like most things Lance. Lance’s shoulders were relaxed and his posture was quiet to whatever the blue paladin was thinking.

 

            Lance was an enigma; a fighter with a deadly shot, a flirt with endless steam, a relic with a thousand stories. He was the kind of person that Keith would never speak to, let alone trust, let alone fight an endless war against a tyrant whose reign spanned millennia with, let alone fall in love with.

 

_You’re only in love with him because you’ve lost the only other thing that stroked your ego,_ a wicked voice whispered in his mind. _You’re only in love with him because he validates you, because he gives you attention, because he takes your shit, because he’s not afraid to yell back. You’re in love with him because he wouldn’t ever say no to you._

 

 

            It had been a week since Shiro went missing.

 

            It had been a week since Keith had left his room, or spoken to anyone.

 

            It had been a week since anything had ever been the same.

 

 

            “You know, you can come in here, babe.” Keith’s head snapped up to see Lance, leaning with his weight on his elbows, perched against the controls. He raised an eyebrow at Keith’s expression. “You _should_ be asleep, but I know you don’t work like that.”

 

            “ _You_ should be asleep too,” Keith said immediately, the words leaving his mouth before he could even finish processing Lance’s statement. “Do _you_ not work like that?” _Swinging with your words too, apparently, huh Keith?_ A woman’s voice murmured.

 

            Lance put his hands up in surrender. “Look, if you wanna come in here and talk, you can. Don’t stand far away from me and be bitter. It’s patronizing.” His words, typically ones that would ruffle Keith into an argumentative mode, were warmer than usual. Keith let them glide over him, unable to muster anger.

 

            “ _You’re_ patronizing,” was all Keith got out before he made his way over. With each step, his boots rang against the hollow ground, echoing in the near-silent room.

 

            “And you love me for it,” Lance said, easy as breathing, stepping over to make room for Keith to lean against the palace’s controls. “It’s nice to see you. What’s up, Kogane?”

 

            “We haven’t… Talked much...” Keith puffed, unsure of eloquently describe his mental state in a way that Lance understood. Keith was good at many things, none of them being emotional verbosity. “Not really, since…”

 

            “Shiro,” Lance continued, using their leader’s name with a hesitance that Keith had never heard before. “It’s been kind of an emotional shitstorm for all of us, right?”

 

            ‘Emotional shitstorm’ wasn’t how Keith wanted to describe it, but the phrase did uncomfortable poetic justice to the situation. Keith spent seven days in between states of panic, anger, disassociation and sleep. In his dreams he chased Shiro’s retreating form, his back always out of Keith’s reach. Every time he stopped to catch his breath, all he could hear was, _‘Are you giving up on me?’,_ in Shiro’s broken, battered voice. Every time he woke up, winded and frustrated, a heart heavier than when he put it to sleep.

 

            That made sleeping more difficult than Keith was willing to work with. So anger meant moving, moving meant exhaustion, and exhaustion meant not-sleeping. It passed the days.

 

            Not like Keith could talk much about the ‘all of us’ part’, though. Spending all seven of the past seven days in solitude didn’t help him gain insight on his team. He hadn’t seen Allura since they touched back in the castle. He hadn’t seen Pidge since he climbed into Black Lion, Shiro’s name on his tongue.

 

 

_I want you to lead Voltron._

 

 

            He couldn’t get his head on straight, let alone care about the other paladins and their wellbeings.

 

 

            (His closest friends, the love of his life, the people who deserved his attention the most).

 

 

            “How are the others?” His voice sounded small, even to his own ears. Lance pushed his weight into the palms of his hands and turned off the holoscreens, leaving the room swathed in indigo tones from the ever-night sky that surrounded them. “I haven’t even seen them since we returned,”

 

            “They’re doing about as well as they should be, given the circumstances.” Lance mused, and Keith shot him a confused look. What was _that_ supposed to mean? Circumstances?

 

            “What do you mean?” It came out more jarrish than it should have been, but Keith was a swinger.

 

            “Babe, we’ve spent the last year or… _God knows_ how long in space, far-as-fuck away from Earth and our families, fighting in a war that we didn’t even _know_ was occurring, against a tyrant superpower who was conquering planets faster than we can name them. “Lance said, voice dry. “So _after_ we killed said ‘tyrant super-dick’, and have finally gotten a chance to let the full weight of everything hit us, _at once,_ I’d say a missing leader and months worth of psychological, emotional and mental trauma are playing out pretty greatly, actually.”

 

            Keith was silent, tongue held between his teeth as he let Lance’s words roll over him.

 

            It had been four hundred and seventeen days, since they’d left Earth in the rattling rise of the Blue Lion. The morning before their final battle with Zarkon, Shiro’s count was at four hundred and ten. Keith picked up where Shiro left off. Shiro kept a running count, etched into the corner of his mind and every morning he’d remind Keith of the total. When Keith asked, Shiro said he’d started it during is imprisonment, until he lost count.

 

            Keith had spent enough time watching Shiro to know that his curled shoulders and trembling fingers could dictate when he had lost count.

 

            “I…” Keith was never good at putting his thoughts into words.

 

            “I’m not upset at you, Keith,” Lance was always good at putting Keith’s thoughts at ease. “I know you’re a solo pilot on this kind of thing.” Lance met Keith’s eye, mouth quirking. “No pun intended.”

 

            “You’re the worst,” Keith groaned.

 

            “I know, aren’t I horrible?” Lance smiled, then it dropped. “Hunk is… He gets his emotional stability from us, I think. When we’re okay, he’s okay. When we’re broken, he can’t be anything other than broken. So when we got back he was…”

 

            “Bad?” Offered Keith, head tipped.

 

            “Yeah, but like…” Lance ran a hand through his thick bangs. “He didn’t know _how_ to react. You were gone, Allura was a _mess_ , Pidge went offline, and I… He gaged his reaction off of me, and we spent a lot of time together. He doesn’t know how to mobilize his feelings.”

 

            “What do you mean, mobilize?” Keith felt he was briefly emulating a broken record, repeating everything Lance was saying back to him in a dazed, off-key state of confusion.

 

            “He wants to do something, I guess. Hunk solves his problems by _doing_ things, and that’s always how he’s been. Right now we’re drifting somewhere in deep space, no mission, no plan, no idea of what we’re doing. He doesn’t want to sit and do nothing, because then shit catches up to him.”

 

            Lance knew Hunk a thousand times better than Keith thought he did. He would consider himself close to the yellow paladin, but…

 

            “I’ve known him since like, grade school. Not to get psycho-analytic on someone else’s problems, but I know the guy. He’s… Better now. But I know that he looks to me- to _us_ ,” Lance said, gesturing to the space between the two paladins, “for how we operate, and how to… Feel, ya know?”

 

            “Why us?” Keith said suddenly, and then, “why not Sh-” _Oh._

            “Yeah,” Lance’s smile was wry. “That’s… That’s why.”

 

            Shiro had always controlled the mood of the room. Keith knew he didn’t do it on purpose, but his authority stretched onto more than words and actions. _An authority you will never carry._

Shiro left a big shadow to fill, sometimes.

 

            “How’s Pidge?” It left him quietly. Lance exhaled steadily.

 

            “They’re… I’ve never seen them like this.” Lance’s voice was almost inaudible over the hum of the castle. “I didn’t know how close they were to Shiro, or what their attachment was to Shiro, but they’re… They’re fucking wrecked, Keith.”

 

            Oh.

 

            “They’re not eating well, or sleeping, or moving. They’ve been in their room for the past few days, working on Rover models and trackers and just driving themselves up the wall. They don’t want to distract themselves, or take a shower, or move around a little bit, or change their bandages. I know Pidge is one-track minded, but _Jesus,_ Keith… I had to…” He rubs a hand over his face. “I had to ask Allura for a sleep drought to put in their food that I brought them. That’s why they’ve…”

 

            _Oh._

 

            “Are they asleep right now?” Keith asked. Lance nodded, once.

 

            “I know that doing that isn’t… It’s not fucking right. But what else was I supposed to do? Let them run themselves into the ground? They’d do it, knowing them. They’ve never been able to stop themselves once they get like this, ever since I’ve known them. Pidge works through their trauma by ignoring it, and ignoring their safety and their wellbeing. So I had to…” He crosses his arms over his chest, shoulders drawn in. “I had to be the one to stop them.”

           

            What was Keith supposed to do? To say? Lance had been running updates on everyone, keeping tabs on all of them and keeping them all remotely _sane_ , and Keith had been hallucinating and stabbing shit with his knife. Lance knew how to work with people like Hunk and Pidge, how they operated and how to interfere. Shiro probably would have just forced Pidge to move, with force or his words or _something_ , but what would Keith do?

 

            _Pidge is sixteen._ He mused. _Would I let them run themselves dry_?

 

            Lance, unaware of Keith’s tumultuous thoughts, kept speaking, voice cracking. “Allura’s not much better, but she’s… Different. She doesn’t know how to move forward, how to finish off the Empire, or where to start closing ties.” That startled Keith.

 

            “What do you mean?” Closing ties? Finishing off the Empire? Did they really think that Zarkon’s death meant that the credits could start rolling on the Galra regime?

 

            “Well, I mean, Zarkon’s dead, we think, and I’m willing that the Empire didn’t take a holiday to mourn his death. They still have heavy influence, everywhere, and topping the regime doesn’t end with killing the head honcho. We… We gotta sweep out their influence, and control on other places, and knock off the other pegs that keep the Gal—the Empire running.” _Haggar_ , the name was unsaid between the two of them, but sat there nonetheless. _Sendak. Lotor._

_They’ve already started mobilizing a plan to end the Galra’s power,_ Keith’s mind was buzzing. _To stop the spread, to cut it off from the roots so that the Empire can collapse on itself from both directions. The scattered leadership at the top, and the loss of power at the ground level. Without Zarkon’s fleet and Haggar’s eye, we could split up, divide and conquer the planets that still have Galra presence. I haven’t even recovered from the fight, gotten back to square one, and Lance has a plan, to find our family, go home._

_Home._ Keith hadn’t thought of home, not since they left the Earth, not since he left the Garrison (hell, not since he _got_ there). Home for Keith was an amalgam, the places he deemed “never again”, fences stomped over by the abundant feeling of flight. The Garrison, with its skyhigh curfews and midnight view, dusty hoverbikes and lack of colour. The shack, with a pulse different from Keith’s blood and a heat that sang its way down your spine.

Keith had never thought about their journey ending, content with space roaming, swinging with Death to pin their way towards a grandiose idea of ‘saving the universe’.

_“_ Keith, you there?” He blinked once, twice, and focused on Lance whose face was inches from his own. “You look lost in your thoughts there.” Keith opened his mouth, words tacky in his mouth and clogged in his throat.

 

            _I’m afraid to pilot the Black Lion to admit that Shiro is gone I don’t want to lead Voltron because I’m not ready and one of the enemy I’m afraid to see my teammates to admit that I’m incapable of being their leader I’m so in love with you and I can’t tell you because you’re better than me in every way—_

 

            “Sorry,” He blurted, louder than necessary, and Lance flinched away from the words before standing straight again. “I’m just…Thinking about stuff?” It came out like a question. He cringed at the sound of it.

 

            “You wanna talk about it?” Lance said, easy and still. His eyes, unreadable in the dark light, were trained on Keith.

 

            “Do you wanna hear about it?” Keith shoved back, words leaving him quickly.

 

            Lance raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I _asked_ ,” He breathed, after a beat. “So yeah. Lay it on me, loverboy.” Keith frowned.

 

            Where did he even start? He took a deep breath, and said the first thing that came to his mind.

 

            “Shiro asked me to lead Voltron.”

 

            Lance fell over.

 

            “Shit!” He had leaned back to rest his weight on the control console, but overshot the spot where his elbow sat, so he collapsed against the metal flooring. The sound rattled the controls room, shaking Keith’s bones. “Shit, ah, fuck— fuck, fuckin’, _fuck.”_ Lance ran a hand over his back, probing where he landed, eyes avoiding Keith’s face.

 

            “What the fuck was that?” Keith blurted, watching as Lance stood up tentatively. “Are you—“

 

            “I’m okay.” Lance’s voice was strained. “Surprised, a bit, but okay. Keep… Keep talking.” Keith frowned, searching Lance’s face for signs of, fuck, _anything_ in his face that would give away how he felt.

 

            “Uh.” Keith faltered. “Uh. Okay. Um.”

 

            “When did he ask you?” Lance asked, voice quiet.

 

            “When we… When we got stranded. Him and I. He thought he was gonna die, and… He asked me to lead Voltron.” Keith stopped. “And when he was in trouble, I piloted Black… Black let me in, and I flew her. A-And then later, he asked me another time to lead whe- _if_ he left.”

 

            _Stop talking about this. Stop talking about this. Backtrack. Backtrack._

 

            “Are you serious?” Lance’s voice was quiet, flat, almost wavering. Keith wanted to take back what he said, talk about anything else, _anything_ that didn’t render Lance looking at Keith the way he was, and Keith looking at the floor, praying it would swallow him alive.

 

            “Yeah, I am.” Keith admitted. “But I-”

 

            “Keith motherfuckin’ Kogane, if your next words are that you ‘don’t want to lead Voltron’, I’m just gonna have to punch you, and then toss you out the goddamned airlock.” Lance cut him off.

 

            “What the—What the fuck? _Why?” Why does it matter to you,_ Keith’s mind sang. He turned to face Lance fully, arms crossing. “What does _that_ mean?”

 

            “It means,” Lance said, breathing through his nose, “That you aren’t allowed to look down on this, because you don’t feel like you’re ‘leader enough’, Keith. Shiro picked you because he thought you were the best one to be a fuckin’ leader.”

 

            Lance was pissed. Keith’s mind reeled, words leaving him faster than he could think them.

 

            “I don’t have to do it, just because Shiro thought I was more than I am. Hell, _you’re_ more of a leader than I am! I don-”

 

            “Don’t use my name in this! Shiro chose _you_ ,” Lance seethed, “Because _you were his favourite_. Because his eyes were always on you, Keith.”

 

            “Not true!” Keith snapped.

 

            Lance groaned, hands finding his hair again. “Don’t deny it, Keith! You never looked past Shiro to the rest of us, and Shiro never took his eyes off of you. You’ve always _been_ pushed the hardest, given the most responsibility and expectations, fuckin’—Shiro didn’t pick _me_ , because he never saw me as a leader. The only one he saw was you, Keith.”

 

            “What does that even mean? That I’m a shit leader, but Shiro picked wrong?” Keith roared, fingers curling into fists. _Keith, pull your foot out of your mouth before you lose the person closest to you_ , his foster mother’s voice rang in his head. _You need to stop swinging._ “That I’m not good enough to be a leader? Is that what you think?”

 

            “No!” Lance’s voice cracked. “No, its not, _Jesus fuckin’ Christ_ , Kei— It means that Shiro, with all his fuckin’ leadership-and-prowess, saw you and wanted _you_ to fill his footsteps. Even with _all your flaws_ , Keith, he wanted you to be our fuckin’ leader. Knowing and seeing how you are, with everyone.” Keith opened his mouth again. “No! No. Let me finish. Please, man. Let—Let me talk for a bit, okay?”

 

            Keith closed his eyes, breathing once, twice, before meeting Lance’s watery eyes again. _Wait, shit—_

 

            “Just hear me out, for just a tic.” Lance took a step forward, the soft light play in the room casting a smooth shadow along his face. “Look, Keith, I know that Shiro’s got big boots to fill. I know that he seems like, like he’s a million miles away, all the time, and that it never feels like he’s running at our level, right? I know. But I also know that… That stepping away from this isn’t gonna help us get our shit together. We need to get Shiro back, and clean off the Empire before we can retire.”

 

At that, Keith snorted, but Lance kept going. “I’m serious! We need to reorganize our team and figure out how we’re gonna get this whole fuckin’ shebang to work. And you don’t have to be Shiro, if you don’t want to.”

 

            It was silent for a moment, Lance’s words buzzing in the heavy air between them.

 

            Who was going to fill the void of Shiro’s leadership if it wasn’t Shiro himself? Keith spent his entire life chasing perfection. When did that become the image of Shiro’s shoulders, and the shadow they cast?

 

            “Shiro didn’t _want_ me to lead Voltron. He asked you, because you’re the one he trusts with that power. And like I said, it’s, like, big boots to fill.”

 

            _‘Big boots’ is an understatement. Shiro was perfect, he was the perfect resurrection of strength and temperance and power and trauma, a deity of grace and molten leadership, a storm that was humble and quick. He was a weapon of violent creation and defined humanity, the exact kind of soul needed to fill Black Lion’s cockpit._

_Keith could never fill that on his own._

 

           

**Author's Note:**

> title is an ANOHNI reference. good, ethereal shit right there.  
> ([find me on tumblr here](http://plutoeux.tumblr.com/))


End file.
